The invention relates to the manipulation of pictures by digital methods in diverse fields ranging from broadcast television, infra-red imaging and military image processing, to medical electronics, sonogram displays and pattern generation equipment for commercial artists.
Although it has long been acknowledged that digital techniques have much to offer, particularly where flexibility is important, the implementation and optimization of the appropriate function on anything, but a theoretical basis is often a tedious and cumbersome task.
Even small changes in special purpose hardware are difficult and expensive to undertake and, whilst the digital computer has been available to make light work of the computation aspects, the peripheral equipment necessary for entering images as data into the computer and for displaying the computed results has not been so readily available. Those pieces of equipment that have been built tend to be slow or inflexible and frequently limit the quality of picture.